


The Mine

by AlternateLaw447



Category: Original Work
Genre: Creepypasta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-18 06:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21506386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlternateLaw447/pseuds/AlternateLaw447
Summary: a (Short) creepypasta story. Also my first ever posted to AO3.





	The Mine

The semi-official term for a fear of clowns is Coulrophobia, which you would believe had some elaborate meaning. It does not: the word Coulro is half-assed greek for a man on stilts, only butchered like it was written by a fifth-grader. The idea of the fear of clowns is much more present than the actual thing. In fact, I have learned, actual phobias, genuine and honest-to-goodness phobias, are pretty rare. What most people call a phobia is just a discomfort, or a dislike. So if you have a buddy who tells you he has a bad case of coulrophobia, well, he is probably full of shit. Just does not like clowns, you know?   
This ties in to my work as a cop. Sometimes you hear things and they boggle the mind. The gay panic defense - that someone is so afraid of gay people they had no choice but to attack them - comes to mind. Let us just presume for a moment you get a guy in who attacked a clown in a haunted house attraction. He might claim to have a phobia of them. That, like an arachnophobe confronted with a spider, he panicked and lashed out. Not his fault. Temporary insanity, heated moment, yada-yada bull-shit. To me, that is just an asshole avoiding the consequences of his choices, however hurried they might be. He got startled, lashed out, and now a guy has a broken nose. Own it, you know?

But there are always outliers. Genuine cases, you might say. Guys who really are that afraid of clowns. Who really do panic at the sight. Who really do lash out without being fully in control. Now, it is one hundred percent outside my pay grade to talk about what to do in such cases, so far as penalty and responsibility go. Because, on the one hand, right, you know you got a fear, so would you not try to avoid it? On the other, there is genuine suprise to consider. It is a total hairball. 

Hairball's what my first boss called situations that, as you tried to unravel them, only got worse and worse. Like a ball of hair you tried to take apart, if you can imagine such a thing. 

I am getting off track, though. I wanted to write about the mine. Mine, not mime, by the way, in case the obvious pun jumped to mind.

So, I joined the force in the year of our lord nineteen-eighty-nine. Makes me feel old to type it out, even though, in fact, I was quite young when I joined, only twenty one. It was a small town operation, only ten cops for three shifts, the pay was horrible and the job boring as watching paint dry a fully ninety-nine percent of the time. Traffic citations, the occasional domestic violence call, the occasional vandalism or breaking and entering. Really I sound like I am bitching, but, it was a good gig in a lot of ways for a new cop. The people in town were respectful, everyone knew my name inside the first month, and even the domestic violence cases calmed down when I would get out of the cruiser. Not a bad place at all.

The town itself - and no, I am not going to say its name - was an old mining town. I am sure you have seen the type. Back in the early part of the twentieth century, there had been a number of operational coal mines in and around the town. By the early eighties, they had either became unprofitable or dried up entirely. The mines closed down but the mine shafts remained. Occasionally we would find a sink hole from one, now and again. The main entrances were shut off with enormous steel doors, and that dissuaded people from entry well enough.

So, started in eighty-nine. By ninety, I was one of the boys, and, one of the town. I was comfortable enough to stop at the local bar on the way home, so long as I was out of uniform. The bar was next to the town dump, which was kind of funny in a way, but I had been assured this was a simple case of progress; the bar had come first. So one day I am sitting there, having a Budweiser and watching some baseball, when the drunk next to me asks if I want to hear a story about the town.

I tell him sure, because it is always good to connect with people, and, hell, it might even have been a good story. 

First off, he asks me if I have ever wondered why the town has no carnivals or fairs, how none ever stop by. I tell him the truth, that I had not noticed it, but that had I, the logic would have been that the town was to small, maybe, to attract them.

He tells me that is part of it, but the other part of it is that back in eighty-four, a carnival did stop by. A genuine, traveling, on-the-road carnival. The way the old guy described it, the thing sounded like Barnum and Bailey's, but who knows how accurate a depiction it was, considering how he was obviously two sheets to the wind and telling a story to a guy in a bar, you know? He did mention the cops hated the carnival because they were pretty skeezy, as such people went. That is not surprising to me. 

Long story short, the chief of police then, a guy named Williams, had a severe and genuine fear of clowns. The drunk could not explain it, but he was adamant, the man feared, and, due to that fear, hated, clowns. What did the carnival have? A clown.

Not a troupe of clowns. Not even a clown duo. Just a single, solitary clown. 

The policy that Williams had was that he would not under any conditions work the carnival. No one even talked about it or suggested it. Instead, he just sent other cops to do it. No big deal. 

Problem was, the clown got wind that the chief had a problem with clowns. Now, the drunk was not sure how the clown found this out, but once he did, he had himself a mission: go find the chief, and convince him to give clowns a chance. 

Finding the chief was easy enough, since he was at the station. No one else was; they were all at the carnival running security. Even the receptionist was gone for the day. The chief was alone in his office, which was of course helpfully labeled with his name and title. The clown must have felt sure it was a lucky day. Confronting him, in his office, in full clown regalia, was a pretty foolish thing to do, though, because the man lost his mind at the sight. Out came the baton and the clown was soon laid out on the floor.

Now, that might seem to you like a comedic image. Clown laying on the floor, giant shoes pointing upward, cop standing there with a baton smeared with white face paint. Hah-hah-hah, right? No. The chief knew he was in deep shit; he had just attacked an unarmed civilian in his office. No laughing matter. He had to take care of this, now. 

First thing he did? Order the men out providing security for the carnival to roust them, now, no questions asked. Get them out of town. The cops did this, and the carnival, not surprisingly, fell to anarchy and chaos as it left under threats of imprisonment and jail time. They left some of their gear. And the clown. After that all that was left was to make the clown disappear. No one would come looking for him, after all.

Williams stuffed the clown into his cruiser and headed for the only place in town you could reasonably dump a body: an old mine. The nearest one of those was in the new town dump, which had been built right near one of the mine shaft entrances. This was, the drunk assured me, a planned thing, because no one wanted to live near the shaft entrance anyway. Why not put a dump there? 

If you were a bored kid in the summer, getting into the mine shaft entry way would have been an insurmountable task. Williams was a cop and had bolt cutters, and was, frankly, fighting for his life. So he cut his way in without missing a beat. You have to forgive me, here, but I can just about imagine the mag-light cutting through the gloom and dark, revealing the walls of the mine, the debris on the floor, all of it. It is a moving and disconcerting sort of vision.

For his part, the drunk here told me that he came upon this scene and Williams related what had happened and presented it as a simple choice: tell no one, or turn up missing from custody. The drunk, being smart, took the second option, and then showed a remarkable amount of gumption by offering to help dump the dead clown in the mine. 

Imagine, for a moment, a cop and a drunk guy hauling an unconscious clown into an abandoned mine in the dark. 

The drunk tells me, with some pride, that he was a coal miner once, before the mines shut down. So when he started to see evidence of rock fall in the tunnel, he told the chief to just dump the guy - pretty soon the whole fucking thing would come down on top of the corpse, bury everything forever. The chief was happy to oblige. They scurried out, resealed the entrance, swore to keep it a secret, and then went their separate ways, the cop in his cruiser, the drunk on foot.

I told the drunk this was a terrible fucking story, if it were true. The drunk had to agree, and then said words I had not realized i had been dreading. "That is not all there is to it, though." 

A month later, and Williams dies in a car crash on his way home from work. Nothing suspicious about it; just driving home in poor weather conditions and lost control. The town mourned and moved on. 

A year goes past, and the town finds out it is on the carnival black list. Fine by everyone. Then, a barn fire out in the country happens and a bunch of old, junked cars end up hauled to the dump. They had been inside the barn when it burned, and were all write-offs. Nothing remarkable, right, except the dumb son of a bitch running the forklift stacked all the cars in one spot, eight of them, a two-by-two-by-two cube of cars. Maybe that would have been fine, but then the rain came and just hammered the town for almost a week. Every day a thunder storm.

The ground got wet, then soggy, then saturated, then flooded, and then, because of the weight of the cars and the weight of the water and the disturbance of the dump site, failed. A sink hole fully twenty feet long by ten feet wide opened in the middle of the dump, tossing the cars in and exposing a shaft dug below the dump. The general policy at the time dictated that someone go down, check for further signs of instability, and then they assess what to do, whether that's fill the hole in or something else. 

A guy goes down and reports a clown is in the shaft, further along than where the collapse happened. And by "report" I mean "ran out screaming about it". Coulrophobia strikes again. 

Further investigation revealed a dead clown. Only two things were wrong with the corpse. One, it was not where the drunk and Williams had left it, nor in the position they had left it in. Two, the chewed lower leg bone laying next to it, and the leg tied off above the knee. A blood stained bit of rock was nearby, with a nice sharp edge. 

Near as the drunk could figure, the clown was just knocked out, not dead. The poor bastard had woken up, concussed and in the dark, and then wandered around. There would have been plenty of water around; the mines were always getting water in them. But food would have been scarce. So the guy probably went weeks, drinking the water, searching for anything to eat, before turning to his last resort of his own leg. 

I asked him why he would tell me this. It implicated him, after all. The drunk just shrugged. 

That irked me, but it was also an accurate summation of the situation. Everything he had said was hearsay. All witnesses were dead or long gone and untraceable. Evidence, if it had even been collected, would have shown nothing, back in ninety. Even worse, it implicated a beloved town figure in a heinous crime. Odds of prosecution would have been basically nil, and I would have gotten bawled out for bringing it to public attention at all.   
Afterwards, I asked around. I knew Williams was real, after all. The rest of the story more or less checked out, right down to the sinkhole. The going theory among the force was that the clown - during the rousting perhaps - had fled or snuck into the mine and gotten trapped. It was tragic, sure, but also an accident. One of those "weird cop stories" you hear now and again. 

I put it out of my mind, but just the other day a haunted house opened up in town, and it had a clown. I wonder what Williams would have thought of that?

**Author's Note:**

> This was written using this prompt, from my prompt generator:
> 
> Narrator Involvement: Came upon scene after events  
> Narrator Description: A Cop  
> Narrator Tone: Incredulous  
> When Event Occurred: Decades Ago  
> Event Duration: Extremely Long  
> Event Type: Experience  
> Event Detail: Loss of Sanity  
> Story Traits: Carnival, Dump, Extreme Isolation, Mine
> 
> As with any good prompt, I only took the parts i liked.


End file.
